Metropolitan Museum of New York Implements Plan to Monitor Origin of Works of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of New York announced a new plan to monitor the origin of its works of art, amid increased scrutiny from authorities and an increase in the returns of looted antiquities from their countries of origin.

The Met will add a team of four people to analyze the origin of the works and will reinforce that work in the case of those that come from art dealers who were investigated, confirmed the director of the institution, Max Hollein, .

The museum also formed a committee of 18 curators, curators and technicians to review its policies and practices on issues of origin.

In this way, the Met seeks to ensure that the works of art in its collection are acquired and exhibited in an ethical and responsible manner, and to avoid the acquisition of stolen or looted antiquities.

According to Hollein, the inspection will affect “several hundred” pieces, most of which came to the collection between 1970 and 1990, in a period of great growth in the museum in which “there was less information available and less scrutiny” about its origin.

The Met has one of the largest collections in the world, with 1.5 million works spanning 5,000 years of history. In recent years, he returned antiquities that had been looted from Egypt, Greece, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria or Turkey, following investigations by the authorities.

In this sense, the New York justice system returned to China on Tuesday two seventh-century stone funerary sculptures valued at 3.5 million dollars, the object of international trafficking and seized at the Met.

For more than two years, a vast campaign to restitute stolen antiquities in some 20 countries, which landed in museums and galleries in the megalopolis, including the prestigious Met and its wealthy collectors and donors.

“It is incumbent upon the Met to more intensively and proactively examine certain areas of the collection and increase the resources we dedicate to this crucial work,” the director said in the note.

The prestigious New York museum seeks to position itself at the forefront of discussions on “cultural property” and plans to bring together activists and “opinion makers” on that issue, inside and outside the museum, with reports, alliances and activities, Hollein said.

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